My bedroom before reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Sad!) I’m generally a clean, tidy person. My mom is the tidiest people I know and cleanliness is a value she passed on to me. Be that as it may, I’m certainly not as tidy as she is. I figured reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up would […]
Month: January 2017
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Last night, I watched The Founder, a movie about Ray Kroc, the businessman who joined McDonald’s and turned it into the fast food powerhouse that we know and love. In the film, Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton, preaches the power of persistence. Ray had what Angela Duckworth might call “grit,” or a combination of passion and […]
February
Book 5: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics I am extremely excited to read this one. Behavioral economics, or basically the intersection of psychology with economics, is the study of human behavior that drives economic decisions. Traditionally, economics assumes that we are rational actors. Unfortunately, humans are prone to being quite irrational. Shortlisted for the Financial Times and […]
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis
Wow. Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you sit down to read, and then you finish in one sitting. Then you write about it online, recommending it to everyone. That’s the process I followed, at least. Hillbilly Elegy is a deeply personal memoir on the social, regional, and class decline of the white working class: the hillbillies, […]
January
Book 1: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley This seemed like a good choice to start 2017. Ridley makes a simple case: based on historical data, humanity is doing significantly better than ever and he sees us only going up. Indeed, there’s less abject poverty, fewer plagues, more people are being fed, and […]
The Rational Optimist
Matt Ridley makes a fascinating case in The Rational Optimist: that humanity, in general, has improved and progressed and will continue to do so. Personally, I am more of an optimist than a pessimist, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, even though I have some disagreements with Ridley’s philosophies and conclusions at times. How has prosperity […]